Numerous studies have, over these past few years, demonstrated the feasibility of driverless vehicles, particularly automotive vehicles.
However, there is currently a stumbling block regarding full-scale introduction of this technology under the normal conditions in which cars move around because it is extremely difficult to make vehicles operate in the real-life environment such as motorways, trunk roads, roads, etc. because of the very varied elements that may constitute the traffic thereon, such as trucks, buses, other cars, motorbikes, scooters, bicycles, pedestrians and animals. Because of this heterogeneity of the traffic components involved, full automation of automobiles, namely driverless vehicles on the open road is not predicted to come to pass before 2030 or even 2035, at level 5 of the OICA (International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers) scale.
By contrast, it is already possible to achieve driverless driving of a stable, i.e. 3- or 4-(or more)-wheel, motor vehicle under controlled environmental conditions particularly on a non-open road, even at speeds in excess of 120 km/h.
On the other hand, the quality of public transport solutions is often unsatisfactory in terms of frequency, in terms of journey time and in terms of the supply fitting the demand with, for example, empty vehicles at night and, in peak periods, vehicles which are packed and excessive journey times.
In order to address the problem of public transport, there are numerous solutions proposed which employ pods guided on a suspended rail placed on pylons, such as, for example the Skytran patent WO 2013/003387 or the SMT rail project. However, all these solutions do is add another mode of transport that is not compatible with the existing types of passenger transport (motorcars, buses, trams, metro, trains, etc.).
In order to improve passenger transport to suit the demand by using driverless automatic vehicles, the Sitar patent application WO2009/106920 proposes a method for automatically guiding motorized vehicles on a road and an automatic transport system using optical guides on the road, which the vehicles read. However, that document envisions lanes with intersections, and even with stops, and this does not make for fast-moving, free-flowing traffic.
Congestion in traffic lanes dedicated to motorcars is often great and also slows down land-based public transport services such as buses or trams. It is therefore often proposed that entire traffic lanes be reserved for these public transport vehicles. However, even though these often take priorities at crossroads, because they often stop at stations and at crossings, their average speed (commercial speed) is very low, at around about 20 km/h or even less, despite their reserved (so-called exclusive i.e. dedicated) lanes.
In addition, reserving these traffic lanes for a certain category of vehicles increases the congestion in the remaining traffic lanes.
In fact, there is a real need to, on the one hand, make the earliest possible use of automated vehicles without the control of a driver, particularly to reduce the level of accidents and, on the other hand, have collective or public transport means that perform well.